ICFAI Business School (IBS) Student Community

[abhishek1711 (shah)]

A new generation of entrepreneurs sees potential in the Internet. This time the emphasis is on making the experience more efficient and personalised

The ‘office’ is a one bedroom flat in Andheri (West). Furnishing: Four desks, printer, server and a kitchen with ‘start up’ supplies (bread, peanut butter, and crates of Diet Coke). This is the Mumbai headquarters of a dotcom dream. A dream for which Deap Ubhi chucked a job in private equity in San Francisco and moved lock, stock and iPod to India.

Ubhi is not a homesick NRI; he was born and brought up in the US. Neither has a VC just given a blank cheque and said: “Go forth and conquer!” Yet, Ubhi is convinced India is on the cusp of “happening”. Eight months ago, the idea of a ‘community based online review site’ was hatched. Co-conspirators included college mates from University of California, Davis.

Fuelled by an angel investment, two of the five founders —Ubhi and Anand Jain — shifted base to Mumbai this June. Their mission: a site that will help Indians make better choices when it comes to social activities. www.burrp.com was in testing mode and is available to the general public now. The USP of the site: 100 per cent democratisation of content. Everything will be user-generated.

And this is not an isolated example. In Delhi, 24-year-old Prerna Gupta is nurturing a very similar dream. The Stanford graduate was working in venture capital, when she had a vision of ‘a social networking site that would change the face of Internet usage in India’. “So, I decided to quit my job and go for it,” she says. That meant shifting to a country she had periodically visited but never actually lived in.

Yaari.com, inspired by the likes of facebook.com and myspace.com, aims to be the place where young Indians hang out and connect online — just as they do in the real world. Sites like orkut.com (from Google) and hi5 are attracting tech savvy Indian youth, but Gupta believes there is a need for a social networking site that offers an India-specific experience.


Due for a beta launch on 12 September, yaari.com currently has a full time staff of three, and is self-funded. This is the new face of the dotcom dream — spending small, thinking big. The inspiration for the dotcom entrepreneur of 2006 is definitely myspace.com, which came out of nowhere to become the ‘world’s most popular website’.

Welcome to Web 2.0, a ‘new and improved’ version of the Internet. The focus: giving users tools and applications to create, modify and use the Web in a manner that harnesses its value as an ‘open’ platform. Successful examples include Flickr (photo hosting site), Digg (a user-controlled news site) Youtube.com (which allows anyone to upload, share, rate and review videos), Wikipedia and the Open Directory Project (human edited directory of the web).

Ajit Jaokar, CEO, Futuretext, calls this the ‘Intelligent Web’. “Who contributes the intelligence? We, the people, through user-generated content (blogs, podcasts, wikis etc.).” Web 1.0 was all about ‘broadcast content’ (content for which we were consumers and not producers).” Projects like Wikipedia have no commercial angle at all, but many others do. The classic Web 2.0 website provides an ecosystem that attracts users. Eventually, you monetise these eyeballs.


The key aspect of Web 2.0 is ‘community’ and this is exactly where the challenge lies. Says Ubhi, “People in the US passionate about craigslist police that site like it is their own baby. That culture is missing here.” The burrp.com team believes such a community can be created, and that the content it generates will be unique and valuable. But can users generate enough spit and fire? Some are laying their bets differently.

Onyomo is a vertical search engine aiming to deliver ‘actionable information’ with a city-specific focus. The idea was born in September 2004 when Shailesh Mehta, an IIT and

INSEAD alumnus, moved to India from London and found himself grappling with simple things like finding restaurants and coffee shops. Teaming up with Amit Khemka, a fellow INSEAD alumnus, he decided to launch a ‘highly scalable search engine with a technical edge’.

Onyomo’s office is housed in IIT Delhi’s Incubation Centre for two reasons: to keep costs low and to harness the expertise of the IIT faculty. The company has two professors on its advisory board — one, an expert in search algorithms and the other, in distributed computing architecture. Onyomo aims to be available on all digital platforms: Internet, mobile and even instant messenger.


Although Onyomo aims to engage the user closely, it will be sourcing much of its content from third party experts. User ratings will be incorporated — but are not being perceived as a USP. A beta version has been up and running since December 2005, covering Delhi and Bangalore and a limited number of product categories. The going has been slow but the founders say that is deliberate: “It is important to get things first; volumes will follow.”


Building a user base is a big enough challenge. Making profits even tougher. The Internet and Online Association of India (IOAI) estimates that the Indian online revenue market has grown from Rs 45 crore to Rs 100 crore in a single year. That is great news for these entrepreneurs, who are banking heavily on ads as a revenue stream. But the experience of MySpace shows how tricky the business is. With over 45.7 million unique visitors in June 2006, it now displays more pages each month than any other website except Yahoo!. However, it generates only $200 million in revenues — less than a tenth of Yahoo!.

Source - http://www.businessworldindia.com/SEP0406/indepth02.asp

[dheeraj_singh (Dheeraj Singh)]

I am an IBS ggn Passout from the batch of 205.

I have created a website at http://www.mbapursuit.com . I want all IBSRocks.com members to find some time and visit the website. All feedback is welcome. Also feel free to join our forum.